10 Answers
10

Guess I know the answer. Try disabling IO APIC. Whether it be Linux, Windows, I always had a HUGE backfire with this, and a full throtle on my CPU. IO APIC/Multi-core on Virtualbox is for showoff only I guess. If you really want multiple cores, use VMWare Workstation/Player/Parallels desktop. (Player is free.)

To be clear: The link you posted has instructions for disabling ACPI from within the running guest OS, which is different than disabling ACPI on the VirtualBox motherboard. In fact, there is a VirtualBox warning that says APCI should not be disabled on the VirtualBox motherboard after a guest Windows OS is installed. I wonder if disabling the APCI configuration before creating a virtual machine will avoid this issue.
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Greg MattesSep 16 '09 at 17:58

This suggestion did not help. When I restart my virtual machine guest OS I cannot interact with it at all. A window appears saying that mouse integration is no longer support and that manual capture is required. But capture doesn't seem to work, so I can't access the VM.
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Greg MattesSep 16 '09 at 18:13

I had this problem on VMWare ESX with a Windows 2000 machine who's machine idle timer (System Idle Process) wasn't properly going to sleep - thus eating all my virtual cycles doing nothing. Perhaps that will lead you to the answer?

ocsid80 is probably right. I am using now 3.0.8 and trying to configure the user setting has little flexibility really. The reasons could be many. These are deep problems rooted in it from what I gather from the virtual box support forums. It could even very well be a result of crazy vista panicing with keeping the demands of virtual box online.